The microphone is about to be unplugged.

Festa Wine & Cocktail Lounge (opens in new tab), a go-to for Japantown karaoke fans, will vacate its home on the upper floor of the Kinokuniya Building mall by the end of the year — two decades after it opened. Owner Masae Matsumoto Beresford confirmed the closure on Monday. “The landlord, Kinokinuya Bookstore, decided not to extend the lease, which expires in December,” she said. 

Rather than relocate, Beresford said she is prepared to close outright, although one of the bartenders was “trying hard to save Festa” in some way.

Another bartender, Connie Jones, who has worked at Festa for 11 years, said building management hopes to lease the space to a more family-friendly business, such as the anime and manga shops that populate the Japantown malls. That means lights out for a high-volume bar that’s open most days until 2 a.m. 

The cost of after-hours security guards patrolling an otherwise quiet mall wasn’t the issue, Jones said. “We pay for security. They raised our rent and still said we’d have to close by 10 p.m. Nobody would make any money.”

She claimed a similar logic forced out Mari’s Mogura (opens in new tab), a sake and karaoke bar that relocated from Japantown to Honolulu last year. Some Festa staffers are looking to buy the bar and reopen it elsewhere in the city, but Jones is pessimistic. Festa, she said, will likely be gone “in December.”

The executive director of the Japantown Community Benefit District,  Grace Horikiri, confirmed that Festa’s days are numbered but was unable to divulge details. A representative of the Kinokuniya Building — the restaurant-filled shopping center anchored by the 56-year old Japanese bookstore (opens in new tab) of the same name — declined to comment, citing confidentiality agreements with tenants. 

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Thankfully, the newly flourishing Japantown has no shortage of karaoke bars. Across Post Street from Festa, the subterranean Dimples has long drawn diverse and occasionally raucous crowds to its recently renovated stage, while K-Box, Pandora, and others are within a short walk. 

But the tiny, tucked-away Festa, with its city skyline backdrop resembling a retro comedy club, has long held an outsize prominence in the loud and crowded karaoke scene, partly due to its cocktails. Fans — or maybe anyone in need of some liquid courage before tearing into the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” — are drawn to the lychee martinis, ginger-and-cucumber saketinis, and Toki highballs. The list of 80,000 karaoke songs is also a draw.